A method for partitioning applications in hybrid reconfigurable architectures

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a methodology for accelerating application segments by partitioning them between reconfigurable hardware blocks of different granularity. Critical parts are speeded-up on the coarse-grain reconfigurable hardware for meeting the timing requirements of application code mapped on the reconfigurable logic. The reconfigurable processing units are embedded in a generic hybrid system architecture which can model a large number of existing heterogeneous reconfigurable platforms. The fine-grain reconfigurable logic is realized by an FPGA unit, while the coarse-grain reconfigurable hardware by our developed high-performance data-path. The methodology mainly consists of three stages; the analysis, the mapping of the application parts onto fine and coarse-grain reconfigurable hardware, and the partitioning engine. A prototype software framework realizes the partitioning flow. In this work, the methodology is validated using five real-life applications. Analytical partitioning experiments show that the speedup relative to the all-FPGA mapping solution ranges from 1.5 to 4.0, while the specified timing constraints are satisfied for all the applications.